| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: to this neglect of the original beat there is a limit.
'Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,' (3)
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for
though it scarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the
iamb, it certainly suggests no other measure to the ear. But
begin
'Mother Athens, eye of Greece,'
or merely 'Mother Athens,' and the game is up, for the
trochaic beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of
the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat
has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: Perhaps they carried some Madonna by
With tossing ensigns in a sea of flowers,
A painted Virgin with a painted Child,
Who saw for once the sweetness of the sun
Before they shut her in an altar-niche
Where tapers smoke against the windy gloom.
I gathered roses redder than my gown
And played that I was Saint Elizabeth,
Whose wine had turned to roses in her hands.
And as I played, a child came thro' the gate,
A boy who looked at me without a word,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon
glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his stairs - situated as
these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel - but on a
deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread,
couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was
familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling
as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon's face had gone, but the
other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that
showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in,
and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as
much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two
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